About Me
I am a Professor of Political Science at the University of Sharjah. My research lies at the intersection of comparative politics and political methodology, with a particular focus on political parties, ideology, representation, and European politics.
I have served as Principal Investigator of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) since 2008. Much of my research uses expert surveys, public opinion data, and quantitative methods to study how political parties position themselves, how voters perceive and choose among those parties, and how political competition varies across countries.
My current research examines voter-party congruence and vote switching, party-system structuration, issue salience, political representation, and the design and measurement properties of expert surveys.
Before joining the University of Sharjah, I was Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Essex and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Research Areas
- Political Parties and Party Systems
- European Politics and European Integration
- Political Representation and Voting
- Political Methodology
- Expert Surveys and Measurement
- Bayesian Statistics
Current Research
Political representation and voter choice
How do voters respond when the parties available to them fail to represent their preferences? My current work examines voter-party incongruence, electoral switching, and the choices voters make among mainstream and non-mainstream parties.
Measuring political competition
Several ongoing projects examine how we measure party positions and political competition across countries, including work on party-system structuration, issue salience, and cross-national comparability.
Expert surveys and political measurement
Building on more than two decades of work with the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, I am studying how expert surveys can be designed more efficiently, how many experts are needed to obtain reliable estimates, and how survey instruments can be simplified without sacrificing information.
For more information about my work, see Research, CHES, and Publications.